Closed - Salem 1692 Fiasco

[Lin]

What's Fiasco?

Fiasco is a tightly produced movie of the genre of your choice in roleplaying game form. Only one thing is certain: things are going to to be complete fiasco.

Its a super rules light roleplaying game. No GM or mechanics for determining what happens. The system is entirely player driven and the plot that unfolds come from where the players wish to take it.

So what's the point of the system? It gives the structure to your freeform roleplaying. Fiasco has an excellent set-up system that allows the players to quickly build up a situation to get the action started and simple mechanics that ensure the game has ups, downs and twists. It contains a built in clock that gives a sense of urgency to the players to develop the action fast: each player only gets 4 scenes, so they need to make the most of them! Lastly, it contains the aftermath table with ensures the ending is a trainwreck.

Like any freeform game, Fiasco relies on the players to trust each others narrative vision, respecting the communal story by building on what other people have contributed and generally trusting the other players to have the best interest of the group's fun time at heart.

Fiasco supports 3-5 players, no more, no less.

For settings, Fiasco uses playsets that contains a bunch of details that will be used to set up the scenario. I will list 3 here that I'd like to play along with their descriptions. Let me know if you're interested.

Salem 1692: After the New Year dawned on 1692, strange afflictions have beset many of the young girls in Salem. Thought to be the precocious nonsense of children, they now suffer episodes of violence and terrifying abuse at the hands of unseen forces. Their forbidden games have brought this onslaught, and they have learned them at the hands of their very neighbors and servants.

Inevitable accusations have now followed. As young as five to as old as eighty, no resident of Salem Village or the surrounding townships, good Christians or no, old or young, are safe from the witch hunt. 1692 will be a year of misery and death for all of Salem Village. Truly, spells and stories are not simple children’s games.

Home Invasion: It’s a nice middle class neighborhood with a nice mix of professional families and a nice, powerful homeowners association. Good people who get involved and know their neighbors. People who aren’t afraid to tell you that the shade of blue you are painting your house is not exactly allowed by the association covenant.

But lately things have been unsettled around Poppleton Terrace—property values are falling, crime is rising, long-time residents have been less than receptive to the suggestions of the standards committee, and now new people are moving in. People who are not like us. At all.

The Penthouse: "Salman bin Nasser al Saud is a Saudi prince, he’s twenty-four years old, and he is heir to one of the biggest fortunes on the planet. Sal’s pride and joy is his penthouse. It’s the most expensive penthouse he and his people could find. Tonight the world’s most moneyed, famous, talented, ruthless, intelligent, and charismatic people—plus those who profit from them—have packed themselves into Sal’s penthouse, and the beats are bumping.

And here comes Sal at the stroke of midnight: drunk, not a care in the world, with a crowd of shrieking underage girls trailing behind him. But what Sal doesn’t know is that this is the last party he’ll ever host at his penthouse. After tonight, everything changes… one way or the other."

[K Man]

Hmmm. Interesting. I'll toss my hat into the potential player arena. Having been to Salem around Halloween in most interested in that setting followed closely by the midnight pumpkin Saudi prince.

[TheZebraShakes™]

If I played this I'd like the salem one, but depending on creativity they could all be fun.

Though I remember a reason I stopped pbp now, reading looooong posts lolol.

[Lin]

The structure of a Fiasco game goes like this:

First, we build a dice pool for the game. The pool consists of 2 white dice and 2 black dice per player. There are going to serve a few different purposes during the game, so we keep them handy.

Then, we pick a seating arrangement. The arrangement is circular, so that each player has two people they are next to. The people you are adjacent to are going to be the ones you have a relationship with, so where you sit is a pretty big deal. We grab some means of recording those relationships and place them in between the adjacent players

At this point, we’re ready for the set up. We roll all of the dice and then pick a first player. That first player picks any of the dice and assigns it to any of the relationships. Each relationship will have 4 dice assigned to it as follows:
1) The Category of Relationship
2) The Specifics of the Relationship
3) The Category of a detail about that Relationship
4) The Specifics of that detail.

The first dice always needs pick the category first. Once the category is picked, a later dice will decide the specifics. The information for this is found in the Playset for the game, which is basically a list of setting appropriate stuff. The relationship only has one set of lists to pick from, but the detail can take one of three forms: a Need, a Location or an Object. Its nice to have one of each at the table and, if a 5 player game, you probably don’t want to have 3 needs or 3 locations because it can be tough to work them all into the story in a satisfying manner.

Anyway, the first player picks a dice, consults the playset and assigns a Category. Then the next player does the same thing, except if they want to, they can add a specific to the category the first player picked. This continues around the table until all the of relationships are filled out with one exception: the last player can ignore the number on the last die and pick any Specific they want.

During this time and afterwards, tabletalk is heavily encouraged to help figure out what types of characters and what type of story might be coming together. For example, one Relationship I pulled from a random playset says “Model and photographer”, so the two players connected by that relationship need to figure out which one is the Model and which one is the Photographer. Details can be left vague at this point as the story hasn’t started yet, but some big picture basics are good to get figured out. As another example, if a relationship has the Object “Tricked out late model SUV”, the players can decide which character owns this object or save it to be something they find during the story. Details are simply things that are going to be important in the story AND that will draw you and another character together, so just having a little chatting about how that might happen is useful.

The last step of setup is deciding on a name and quick description of your character. Less is usually more here, with a single sentence of your character’s occupation and/or the characteristic that stands out most about them.

Then, we are ready to start. The dice pool is returned to the middle of the table and again a player is chosen to start the game. That player gets the first scene. When it’s your scene, your character is the focus. When you are making the scene you have 2 choices: Establish or Resolve.

Establish is what you usually want to do, because it’s how you get to shape the story. When you establish, you design the scene. You tell people what is going on. You can bring other player’s characters into it with you, you can add NPCs to be a part of it, which anyone can play if their character isn’t in the scene and you can drive the narrative in whatever direction you want. The only things you can’t do are tell another player what their character does in the scene (but you can make reasonable suggestions!) and decide how the scene ends. At any point during the scene where the outcome could go well or poorly, another player in the scene to go into the dice pool and grab a dice and hand it to the current player. If it’s a white die, the scene ends well for the character. If it’s a black die, the scene ends poorly for the character. Everyone at the table can contribute to the end of the scene, but if there is some disagreement the active player describes it so long as it respects the chosen die.

Resolve is probably best left for when you are stuck. When you resolve, the rest of the table establishes the scene as above, then you pick the die for how the scene ends.

In the first half of the game, after you get a die at the end of your scene, you hand it off to someone else. This doesn’t have any effect yet, but they keep it for later.

This process repeats around the table until everyone has had 2 turns and thus half the dice are gone. At this point, everyone who has received dice rolls them. You subtract dice of different colors and get a result. The people with the highest white result and the highest black result will get to determine the twist. The twist are two new details that enter the story and are placed in the middle of all of the players: they can affect everyone. During the second half of the game, the players will try to work these things into the story.

In the second half of the game, everything works the same EXCEPT after your scene, you keep whatever die is handed to you.

When the last die is handed out, the game moves to the aftermath. Each player rolls their dice and subtracts the white total and black total to get a resolution number. The higher the total (in either direction), the better the character’s ending. The players take turns once again to make a montage to describe how the story ends taking into account the resolution.

That’s basically it.


Here is the link to the Salem Playset so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about with the Relationships and Details,
www.bullypulpitgames.com/downloads/index.php?cat=7#103

[K Man]

Yeah, I'm still in. This could be fun. Can you play with just 2? Or do you need more?

[Lin]

You need 3-5 to play, but remember there isn't a GM, so its only a total of three people required, not three players and a GM.

[Yakumo]

Give me a day to look into the rules, but I might be interested. The Salem setting looks interesting.

[K Man]

Oct 27, 2014 11:44:25 GMT -5 Lin said:

You need 3-5 to play, but remember there isn't a GM, so its only a total of three people required, not three players and a GM.

lol I wasn't sure if you were just selling the poison or actually drinking it. You know, toss it out there, watch us fail, then laugh and come in to show us how to do it right. Well I'm still in, excited to give it a try. You need me to create the boards for you? I assume it would just be a regular old board, no maps, characters or sub boards I would think.

[Lin]

I'm chugging it down! I'm always up for a Fiasco.

Also, I'm being dead serious. The entire resolution mechanic is "pick good or bad" and at the end "roll all the dice you got to find out how terrible your ending is".

[Yakumo]

Okay I am in, I think that whole bit about the dice pie and how to pick relationships confused me. This is probably something that is way easier to understand in action.

[Lin]

Ok, so we've got four people, this works for me. Next step is to create a forum and arrange our "seating". The playset is already picked, so download it or keep the link handy as we'll need it for the set up. I'll type up the twist and resolution charts at some point (I only own the book in print), but we won't be needing them for a while so no rush. Assigning dice to relationships is really simple and I probably overcomplicated it in my description. Roll all the dice and leave them on the table. Put a relationship card in between each adjacent player. When its your turn, go into the playset and pick [something] that matches any of the dice. Write that [something] on one of the relationship cards. Remove one of the matching dice. Repeat until all the [somethings] are filled, with the last die "wild".

[Something is a relationship category/detail that must be one every card or a Object/Location/Need category/detail, one of the three which will be on every card]

Hopefully that made more sense? If not, don't worry about it just look at the playset and start scheming, it'll be easy.

[TheZebraShakes™]

I can't get the Salem set on my phone for some reason. Am I supposed to download it, might actually have to find a real computer

But I will play. Don't really have the time/energy to learn dnd next or whatever it is called.

[Yakumo]

It isnt dnd next, it seems to be a totally different free form system. I couldnt get the set to show up on my phone either so i took a look on my laptop. If you can't do the same I can Pm the whole bit to you.

[Lin]

I made this image of the "table" for the game. Its got our seating arrangement and all our cards, which are still blank waiting for the setup!

[TheZebraShakes™]

Oct 31, 2014 13:44:20 GMT -5 Yakumo said:

It isnt dnd next, it seems to be a totally different free form system. I couldnt get the set to show up on my phone either so i took a look on my laptop. If you can't do the same I can Pm the whole bit to you.

Yah I meant that I didn't have time for the thing kman is running, but I would give this a try cause it seems fairly easy in terms of rules.

So now we need our own forums to start this thing I guess.

[K Man]

Oct 31, 2014 22:17:56 GMT -5 TheZebraShakes™ said:

So now we need our own forums to start this thing I guess.

I'll get them made tomorrow.

[Yakumo]

Oct 31, 2014 22:17:56 GMT -5 TheZebraShakes™ said:

Oct 31, 2014 13:44:20 GMT -5 Yakumo said:

It isnt dnd next, it seems to be a totally different free form system. I couldnt get the set to show up on my phone either so i took a look on my laptop. If you can't do the same I can Pm the whole bit to you.

Yah I meant that I didn't have time for the thing kman is running, but I would give this a try cause it seems fairly easy in terms of rules.

Derp, I swear I can still read.

[TheZebraShakes™]

Where's the witches??? No one's even mentioned witches once. I guess no one wants to get stuck eating the wtich cake. Seriously though, all the characters are gonna be dead by the end of this and still no witches. . .